TRENDING

Set your sights on smart sites

By Joe Dysart

Aug 03, 1998

Heading into the new millennium, the Internet will evolve into an ever-more sophisticated tool for communications and collaboration, according to industry analysts.

Just about everything that can be done on a standalone computer now probably will be fused to the Net. Several emerging technologies have a head start in transforming the Internet over the next few years.

Intelligent agents are used by millions of Net surfers every day in search engines such as Yahoo and Excite. Next-generation agents will dig much more deeply than current agents.

Ann Lynnworth, a developer of dynamic Web site creation software and co-founder of HREF Tools Corp. of Santa Rosa, Calif., at http://www.href.com, said she believes it is only a matter of time before sophisticated expert systems become part of the Web.

Lynnworth said anyone who can type a uniform resource locator will be able to access expert systems that incorporate the knowledge and decision-making ability of the worlds greatest minds.

One of the most innovative current intelligent agents appears at http://www.sixdegrees.com, the site of MacroView Communications Corp. of New York.

The theory that all persons are loosely connected through a path of six or fewer people is the basis for the experimental online personal networking tool.

Users type in their own name and the name of someone they would like to meet. The sites intelligent agent then combs through its data banks for friends of friends who might know that person.

No more than two years ago, Internet voice telephony was a backstreet game to elude long-distance telephone charges. Using microphones hooked to their PCs, thousands of techno-savvy Net cruisers began talking to others around the world at the flat, local connection rates charged by their Internet providers.

Internet telephony still has substantial ground to cover before its ready for prime time. The audio quality of most Internet phone calls is substandard compared with conventional calls, and the industry is still snagged in a morass of conflicting standards.

Users with different telephony software packages often still cannot communicate with one another. Despite these and other drawbacks, consultants such as Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., predict a heady future for the new medium.

Recent advances in the technology such as Net2Phone from IDT Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., at http://www.idt.com, let a user with a PC microphone call another person on a conventional phone line. The Internet call goes through a PC-to-phone gateway operated by IDT.

Even more interesting is Aplio/Phone from Aplio Inc. of San Bruno, Calif., at http://www.apliophone.com. It weds ordinary phones to the Internet through a simple black box. A user hooks the Aplio box between a telephone line and wall jack, then dials as usual.

When contact is established with another Aplio user, the caller presses a button and hangs up. In 45 seconds or less the phone rings and the conversation proceedsover the Internet. No PC is necessary.

While Internet users rave about the fact they can make free Net phone calls, industry giants such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and PictureTel Corp. of Andover, Mass., are quietly engineering a revolution that will add video into the mix.

Theyre making it their business to put a videophone in every cubicle and at bargain-basement prices.

For the major players, popular demand for Internet video telephony will trigger a ripple effect of widespread demand for their core hardware and software in information technology departments, said Carl D. Howe, a Forrester analyst and author of the companys report, IP Video Giveaway.

Government and corporate IT departments have been reluctant to embrace Internet video telephony, he said, because it slows down current networks. So Microsoft and others are striving to build demand at the grassroots level.

Like Internet voice telephony, Internet videoconferencing has some ground to cover before its ready to hit the market.

Again, the sound quality is inferior, and images streaming across the PC screen are choppy.

In spite of growing pains, an increasing number of organizations regard Internet video telephony as a potentially important business tool.

Working from the virtual Internet desktop, progressive engineers are even styling a new work methodology: 3-D collaborative engineering. It was dreamed up by bleeding-edge computer graphics companies to let engineers and other employees log onto a Web site to design and review a virtual 3-D product together.

Internet 3-D collaboration will not reach widespread use until after the millennium, said consultant Bob Campbell, president of Technovations of Allen, Texas. It represents as much a change in engineering culture as in technology, Campbell said, because project managers would have to learn to oversee virtual teams of dispersed engineers.